Is performance capture as we know it dead?

[Jezza]

I found this article off Den of Geek which I thought many of you here would be interested in:

As Mars Needs Moms bombs, and Disney pulls out of the Yellow Submarine movie, is performance capture – as seen in the likes of A Christmas Carol and The Polar Express – on its way out?

Heralded in some quarters as the future of movies, the performance capture system that's been spearheaded by director Robert Zemeckis has, to date, a couple of big hits under its belt. The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol are the most notable, although Beowulf hardly did shabby numbers, too.

If you're unfamiliar with the term 'performance capture', it's used to describe the mapping of an actor's work into a computer. Thus, they get to wear a special suit, then they act a scene out as usual. This gets captured, and then, at its most basic, an animated version of them ends up in the final product. Think Tom Hanks in the aforementioned The Polar Express, where the system allowed him to effectively play several characters, of different ages and looks.



But the end result has always been a little divisive. Certainly the end result tends to be a hybrid of live-action and animated work, and there were moments in the impressive A Christmas Carol where you couldn't help but wonder what was wrong, exactly, in watching a human being for real, rather than the virtual version of them before your eyes.

Still, performance capture has no shortage of major customers. It's been utilised for the upcoming Tintin movie from Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron's Avatar was, as you might expect, heavily reliant on it.

Yet, the bubble may still be bursting, and this weekend's US release, Mars Needs Moms, could be a major reason why. The film was produced by Robert Zemeckis, and cost some $150m to get the negative on the screen. But an opening weekend take of just $6.9m has led to questions being raised as to whether audiences being treated to cutting edge computer animated movies want the kind of pictures that performance capture is being used for right now.

Of course, there are mitigating factors. Reviews for Mars Needs Moms have hardly been upbeat, and also, it should be pointed out that, once a performance has been captured, there's no fixed template for how it should physically look when it appears on the screen at the end of it all.



Yet, the financial performance of Mars Needs Moms is nonetheless set to be the catalyst for one or two changes. And the first of those is that Disney has backed out of Robert Zemeckis' expensive remake of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine.

The project has been in the cooker for a good year or so now, and The Beatles in the movie had already been cast (Cary Elwes, Dean Lennox Kelly, Adam Campbell and Peter Serafinowicz were on board). Yet, there was still some work to do to get it off the ground.

However, Disney will no longer be involved. And its decision to pull out of Yellow Submarine follows it pulling out of Zemeckis' ImageMovers Digital studio, too (ImageMovers Digital was behind Mars Needs Moms and A Christmas Carol).

Zemeckis is still free to find a new home for Yellow Submarine, but it's going to be a tough sell. And perhaps that's indicative of the fact that performance capture has to now evolve to find its full place in the movie world. Because using such techniques for human characters has been technically impressive, yet it's sometimes created end results that occasionally look just a little odd, if not a bit unintentionally sinister.



Performance capture as a technology is going nowhere, though. It'll form a large part of the work on the Avatar sequels, for starters, and if Tintin hits big, then the sequels to that will keep the torch burning.

But certainly it feels like a chapter in performance capture's evolution is coming to an end, most notably where it's used for the entirety of a film. It's still, undoubtedly, a valuable part of a filmmaker's toolkit, and if you think back to Gollum, where it's deployed sparingly, it can be incredibly effective. Expect Hollywood to follow that path now, at least for the time being.

For while we maintain that performance capture, in its current guise, has been at the heart of some good cinema, we don't spot too many people minding that Hollywood seems to be moving on.

Zemeckis, meanwhile, is said to be searching for a live-action project to tackle instead, which will be his first since Cast Away and What Lies Beneath, both released over a decade ago. As always, we look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

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So do you think it's dead or will we see more performance capture movies?